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How to undermine your social media campaign

Do you feel like you’re doing a little too well? Want to take some steam out of your social media campaign? Well, you’re in luck.

Below are several ways to ruin your campaign and run it straight into the ground. People do it every day, so you have plenty of options to choose from.

Drive your followers crazy

Drive your new friends away and ruin all the hard work put into your campaign by tweeting and posting as much as you can. Irritate your followers with a constant flow of tweets that take up their entire feed.

Posting info that has nothing to do with your campaign is an even better idea. Talk about your day, your home life, or even gossip about other people, including co-workers. If you really want to ruin a social media campaign, make it all about you and not about your company or product.

Alternatively, you can just stick to three things: spam, spam, and more spam. Don’t post anything smart, funny, or helpful; just send out poorly spelled “Come buy our stuff!!!!” messages all day long. That should guarantee that your campaign loses at least most of its loyal fans.

Copy other campaigns

You’ve spent all this time thinking up own ideas—bah! Little did you know that your originality is what’s bringing those pesky customers around. Instead, you need to learn how to copy and paste.

Copying another company’s social media campaign can instantly turn people off to your business. This is especially true if you’re blatantly obvious about it. Try not to have anything original at all, or your followers might think you’re actually trying to stay in business.

See what your competitors are doing for inspiration—and by inspiration, I mean grab what you like and ignore the rest. Once your customers and fans see what you’ve done, they’ll be sure to turn the other way and run.

Spam the rest of the Internet

We already mentioned spamming your Twitter and Facebook feeds, but we all know social media campaigns involve more than just tweets and updates. A big part of a campaign is “going where your customers are.” So hunt them down, and spam them everywhere they go.

This includes finding all the message boards and chat rooms they might frequent. If your customers are big video gamers, head to those message boards and post away. Tell them repeatedly how much they need your company’s product and for a one-time fee, “blah, blah, blah”—you know the drill.

Don’t actually interact with anyone on these sites, just post spam all day. When one account gets banned, just make another. Soon, you’ll have destroyed any credibility you’ve gained with your social media campaign and your customers will be long gone.

Now, on to your PR campaign...

Mickie Kennedy is the founder of eReleases. A version of this article first appeared on the PR Fuel blog.